Environment Bill

Lord Carrington Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carrington (CB)]

My Lords, I fear that in my contribution I cannot be as poetic or as evocative as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, but I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, on focusing these amendments solely on putting heritage on a statutory footing in regard to environmental improvement plans. This prevents succeeding Governments removing these incredibly important matters of heritage and the historic environment from future EIPs. It also makes sure that funding to support heritage under the Agriculture Act has much greater certainty.

This is at the heart of the argument this time. It continues to take into account all the arguments we made in Committee on the importance of protecting heritage of all sorts in this groundbreaking Bill. I believe that these amendments will be a simple change but have a distinct impact. Importantly, they will cover the concerns of the previous amendments introduced in Committee.

Finally, these amendments would also allow the office for environmental protection to monitor heritage in the rural environment as a statutory requirement based on EIPs. I give them my full support.

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests and my passion for heritage landscapes. I have spoken already on the gaping hole in this Bill where heritage should sit, and I need not repeat that. However, having read the Committee stage debate afresh, particularly the Minister’s response, I am concerned that the Government are promoting a false and very damaging dichotomy between manmade heritage, which is delegated to DCMS, and the natural environment, which belongs to Defra. This reveals either a fundamental misunderstanding or a deliberate rejection of the millennia of human intervention in creating our natural landscape, of which we are an integral part and on which so much of our life and biodiversity is dependent. To misquote the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, we are “in” this earth and should not be separated from it.

We are not talking about rural buildings, towers and follies here—important though they are—but the much less sexy engineering works that have created and protected so much of our essential farmable landscape, particularly in East Anglia and the Somerset Levels, as well as vast areas of urbanisation such as the Thames estuary. This dichotomy is dangerous and wrong. I ask that the Minister makes it explicitly clear that the preservation and maintenance of our manmade landscape is a priority for this Government and will be supported through this Bill. This is very important to those of us who live and farm at or near sea level—and sea level that is protected by heritage features.

This damaging misunderstanding is particularly pronounced in the current fashion for rewilding, and the condemnation of any and all human intervention in nature. Having created this green and pleasant land, we must not abdicate our responsibility for it.